One of the comments seems to clarify (slightly edited to cope with the forum formatting):

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The core developers are not required to maintain 2.7 post-2015, and most of them won't be involved in it. That part hasn't changed.

What is happening is that Red Hat is preparing to cut a RHEL 7 release, which AFAIK depending on how much you pay them they support for 13 years. So they will need to figure out how to support 2.7 themselves at least through 2027.

Here is where I am reading between the lines. RH are well within their right to fork Python and keep their maintenance patches to themselves and their customers (Python's not copyleft). But, they are nice guys and so maybe they are willing to upstream their changes at least for awhile if there is still a Python project willing to accept them. Again, this is my speculation based on the ML discussion, not what RH has actually said they will do.

Meanwhile, there are some large companies that use 2.7 extensively on Windows (e.g. Enthought, Anaconda) and the thinking goes that somebody can probably be found to produce a Windows installer once in awhile, assuming that Python.org will still host a download.

So really what is happening here is not very exciting. The core committers aren't doing anything different than leaving the project as originally planned. What is happening is that they will leave the lights on in the source control repository and on the FTP server, so as to capture the free labor from people at large companies who have an interest in continuing to support 2.7.

I've been listening to this nonsense for at least the last three years since I have a few clients heavily vested in Python.

Two comments in Drew Crawford's article say it all AFAIC.

This:

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Articles like Alex’s suggest the solution is to fork:

One solution is to fork Python 2.7, and continue developing the language, adding features in a backwards compatible way so large, unportable (due to financial constraints) Python 2 applications can continue to evolve and improve and bring value to the people and companies that invested so much time developing them. This is the correct thing to do (actually, it would be best if Guido and other leaders in the Python community did this officially instead of forcing a fork).

Maybe Alex missed it, but here’s the button:

A python fork

You don’t need permission. You don’t need to argue with anybody. Just do it! It’s not that hard.

Bingo! SO...you've spent a whole lot of effort not keeping up with the state of the language and now have a bunch of projects you are making good money off of using the old version? And it is your god-given right, to say nothing of your moral privilege, to demand that somebody who is doing this all for free shift their priorities and goals so you can continue to do so? Puh-leez!

and this:

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Blog posts aren’t demand. Demand is people willing to develop. Demand is people willing to fund development. I’d even settle for a $15 themeforest splash page that lists one corporate sponsor and one developer’s bio. How is it that Python is somehow in grave danger of forking and nobody will even buy a domain name for the fork? People literally do that for a weekend hack project. This is a tempest in a teacup if I’ve ever seen one.

Yup. Far too many tech bloggers go on a rant and somehow start to believe they're "speaking for The People" or "The Working Man."

Apparently the project developers they're targeting don't fall under that mantle of righteousness because they just do the actual work rather than hold "informed" opinions about it.

Tempest in a teacup it is. And one that's all too common in the FOSS world where this rampant sense of entitlement is the unfortunate norm.

(Note: I've coded Python in both v2 and v3 - and I really can't see where v2 is provably better. But I'm not a real programmer so that might be attributable to ignorance on my part. My clients, however, are very qualified programming professionals. And both started migrating their codebases over to using Python-3 as soon as it was deemed stable enough to do so. So make of that what you will. )

So not a programmer here, so forgive me if you have to smile at my question:

Does this kind of version war exist in many other places? The only one I vaguely recall might be Visual Basic.

I had vaguely heard of this issue a few years ago, but forgot it because it's not important to me. But I don't recall many people saying the same kind of thing like "Oh man, give me old school Ruby, before it was on that rail crap."

(Note: I've coded Python in both v2 and v3 - and I really can't see where v2 is provably better. But I'm not a real programmer so that might be attributable to ignorance on my part. My clients, however, are very qualified programming professionals. And both started migrating their codebases over to using Python-3 as soon as it was deemed stable enough to do so. So make of that what you will. )

I would imagine the people who program by writing code have little issues with writing for either version, but the people who program by downloading other peoples libraries and gluing them together will have a problem if google doesn't give them something to solve their problem all in the same version of Python .

(Note: I've coded Python in both v2 and v3 - and I really can't see where v2 is provably better. But I'm not a real programmer so that might be attributable to ignorance on my part. My clients, however, are very qualified programming professionals. And both started migrating their codebases over to using Python-3 as soon as it was deemed stable enough to do so. So make of that what you will. )

I would imagine the people who program by writing code have little issues with writing for either version, but the people who program by downloading other peoples libraries and gluing them together will have a problem if google doesn't give them something to solve their problem all in the same version of Python .

Yeah...the bottom-feeders that take the Lego/TinkerToy approach to FOSS deployment and 'programming" are always the first to scream loudest and longest aren't they?

I would imagine the people who program by writing code have little issues with writing for either version, but the people who program by downloading other peoples libraries and gluing them together will have a problem if google doesn't give them something to solve their problem all in the same version of Python .

My problem is that I'm not a Python developer, but I sometimes need to *use* things that are written in Python. As an end user it's very confusing which version I want or need so that the things that I install that use Python will work. It's also not clear whether I can or should just install both Python 2 and 3.

Most of the information out there seems to indicate that as an end user, you should install Python 2 unless you know that you need Python 3. So I've installed Python 2, and things seem to be working OK. But I suspect that there's a bit of cargo-cultism going on here and/or I don't have enough things dependent on Python to have run into a strong version dependency.

I wouldn't be surprised if things would be working OK if I had installed Python 3. I also wouldn't be surprised if things just broke if I did that. So I'll probably stick with installing Python 2.x until something forces me to install 3. I'll only be unhappy if doing that breaks something else, but hopefully it won't, or it will be easy to fix if it does.